Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum What is a "concert tuning"?

A concert tuning is a tuning done just prior to a concert. You try to bring your "A" game and you make sure you are cordial to the artist and you take a bow if you run late, or have to adjust some unisons during the intermission.

(No one ever applauds, but I bow anyway. It's just the principal of the thing darn it!)

You don't David? I get applauded all the time! They're thrilled to death that I'm finished!

A concert tuning is a tuning supposed to hold for one hour or two.

A concert tuning is at a higher level than the orchestra seats, but lower than the balcony.

The church choir robes were too long and needed to be hymned.

The concert resumed once the conductor pitched his wand.
With that said......,
With the apocalypse approaching, armageddon out of here!

There's no "eye roll" smiley widget, but if you can picture it, that's my response to the last two posts.

Hey, by that standard, I do concert tunings too! (And mine don't even need a concert pianist to drift.)

If we all put a concerted effort into everything we did, maybe we'd all be hehe, perfect?

Eye-roll again!

L L

Here's one just for you David.

I'm still waiting for pianoloverus's inevitable post about the ethics of concert tunings. We're definitely swindling people somewhere.

Well I'm not, I don't do 'em.

Speaking of ethics, I'm a little worried about "Scotty" Groot there. Is it ethical to carry that many trebles when the "Keptain" only has a few? If it is, I'm gonna' have to ... (I can't believe I'm doing this) ... I'm gonna' have to take ... note.

You recognize the bionic tuner, using only ETD, with the ear's deformation that occur with time.

the disease is then eventually passed to the pianist , while I did not see yet pianist having those shrarp edged ears (some where wearing a cap, so I dont know for those)

With ears like Spock's, It is easier for us to get the "point." It may get me into a lot of "treble" but heck, I'm used to that.

I remeber that episode! it was called the trouble with trebbles...

So it seems that one of the main differences between a concert tuning and a more normal tuning is a big emphasis on tuning stability at least for a few hours. In simple terms can someone explain what kinds of things a tech does(different from a normal tuning) to achieve the kind of stability needed for a concert?

I just tuned two concert grands for concerts Sunday and Tuesday. They were not badly out of tune beforehand. Ideally, concert pianos should be tuned often enough that big shifts do not occur. One piano had been tuned for the previous concert, November 13. The other was sort of tuned sometime in the summer, but I forget exactly when, and it was a bit further out than the other.

Wow, I really had thought that this thread had gotten irretrievably hijacked.

I think that two different points got reduced to one here. A concert tuning definitely emphasizes tuning stability, AND it is very important that a concert tuning last for a few hours, until the end of the concert. (After the concert is over, nobody cares anymore how in tune the piano is. And if the tuning was a stable one, then it is likely that the tuning would last a great deal longer than a few hours.) However, you can't program your tuning to be very stable AND to last only a few hours - it's not a trade-off.

It's important the the tuning be very very in tune for the duration of the concert - every unison should be good. After a few hours, especially with the stage lights going on and off, and the loading dock door being left open for a while, the tuning will start to fall apart. That's not to say, however, that the tuning wouldn't be ok for someone's living room for a few more months. It's just a matter of different expectations. The same way that if you were going to record a piano, it would make sense to have the piano tuned just before the recording, even though the tuning might be relatively ok.

As for how to achieve tuning stability, that's a matter of technique, practice, and the quality of the piano - you wouldn't expect to see a 45 year old Betsy Ross spinet on a concert stage.

Hope this helps somewhat. However, I can't help but have a hunch that there's a practical aspect to your question that is going unsaid, and you are fishing for a general answer to a more specific question that hasn't been asked, and that the general answers you're getting here will be applied to a specific situation that we don't know anything about. So, of course, the usual disclaimers apply.

Thanks for your reply. Actually for this question and most of my questions here and on the Pianist Corner, the questions usually just pop into my head in some random way often by some association to something else I read.